After Sir Christopher Wren

After Sir Christopher Wren is a watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cardboard painting by Charles Demuth, created in 1920. The painting is a part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. The painting depicts the steeple of the old Center Methodist Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts (now the Provincetown Public Library). The painting is a stunning example of Demuth’s signature style, featuring ruled lines, geometric forms, and crossing beams of light, typical of his architectural paintings and drawings from the 1920s.

Charles Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. He was born on November 8, 1883, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died on October 23, 1935, in the same city. Demuth was a lifelong resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the city’s modest commercial and civic architecture was the subject of hundreds of his watercolors and paintings. His depictions of warehouses, factories, and row houses imbue these ordinary structures (sometimes ironically) with a grandeur and glamor normally associated with cathedrals, palaces, and temples.